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Google Trends: A Tool for Understanding Behavioral Economics
By Sean Luechtefeld on 05/03/2010 @ 12:53 PM
CFED Innovator-in-Residence Mindy Hernandez wrote a fascinating post at her Applying Behavioral Sciences in the Real World blog the other day titled "(Almost) Everything I Wanted to Know about Human Behavior I Learned from Google Trends." In the article, Mindy makes a compelling argument for using Internet search trends to understand human behavior.
To read the full text of Mindy’s post, visit Applying Behavioral Sciences in the Real World.
The article discusses Google Trends and Google Insights, tools that have been created to track where people are focusing their attention. The anecdote Mindy gives is telling – by comparing “Paris Hilton” and “Paris, France,” we can learn that people search for Paris Hilton at alarmingly higher rates.
Whereas the Paris example is meant to demonstrate a point, Mindy points out that Google Trends can be a useful tool for understanding human behavior. What are people concerned about? Is what people search on the Internet today the same as last week? What about last month? If not, what does this say about trends in human behavior? Mindy concludes in her article that timing matters – and that we can identify trends over periods of time to help improve the messages we send. In thinking about her argument, I wondered myself how we might use this important information to further what we know about innovation.
To start, I simply searched the term “innovation” and the results were fascinating. Most notably, interest in innovation declines dramatically at the end of each year. As the chart below suggests, over the past five years, there have been dips in the number of searches done for “innovation.” Furthermore, it looks like since 2004, the mean number of searches for “innovation” has decreased slightly. However, this is less disheartening when one considers that the number of occurrences of “innovation” in the news has increased at a seemingly faster rate. Additionally, attention to “innovation” is always highest at the beginning of the year. Apparently, no one cares about innovation during the holiday season, but then people have a reinvigorated perspective on innovation come the new year. In other words, were we to launch a campaign promoting social innovation, it would be best to do so in January or in the late summer when people appear most interested in innovation.
As another demonstration, I searched “economic opportunity” and “asset building,” two terms commonly heard around our offices here at CFED. Interestingly, “economic opportunity” wasn’t searched for regularly until the midpoint of 2007. Probably un-coincidentally, this was the same time the recession became imminent and around the time President Obama launched his campaign for the White House. Likewise, “asset building” is a relatively new term, at least in terms of the number of searches it receives. It wasn’t until the midpoint of 2009 that people started to search “asset building” regularly. This also suggests something about behavioral economics: the emergence of “asset building” as a popular search term suggests that people were talking about – and perhaps thinking about – economic opportunity in a different way than they had before.
These statistics are interesting and, thanks to Google, easy to use. More importantly, they suggest an important way we can harness the power of behavioral sciences. Understanding what people are searching for online can point us in the direction of comprehending human behavior, while this comprehension can direct the ways we approach innovation.
For a more in-depth discussion of these and other issues, check out Mindy’s post at Applying Behavioral Sciences. The post indicates that this post is only Part 1 of 2, so be sure to check back often for Part 2!
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